Results tagged “literature”

"You could say that this book is about what happens when you give your rites of passage a body-swerve."

Though this is Chandler Burr's first novel, he is also the author of three other non-fiction books: The Perfect Scent, The Emperor of Scent, and A Separate Creation. And if you're smelling sensing a particular theme, you're on the right track--Burr has been the The New York Times scent critic since August '06.

British poet Simon Armitage (b. 1963, Huddersfield, in West Yorkshire) was in town this week for the Seattle Arts and Lectures Poetry Series (still tickets available for Naomi Shihab Nye's second night, May 8).

For those of you who didn't know, April is not only about Easter and April Fool's Day; it's also National Poetry Month!

April 4 is the not-to-be-missed Seattle Edible Book Festival (at Wallingford's Good Shepherd Center, 4649 Sunnyside Ave. N.) where word nerds, book lovers, and creative cooks can get together and cook the books so to speak, or eat their own words and laugh over hokey literary puns.

Author John Updike was at Seattle Arts & Lectures this week. The upcoming SAL appearance of Annie Leibovitz (November 19) is sold out. Michael Pollan (January 12) is almost sold out.

JOHN FUCKING UPDIKE: His gallivanting rabbits may have lost a step, Updike reports: "When, against my better judgment, I glance back at my prose from 20 or 30 years ago, the quality I admire and fear to have lost is its carefree bounce, its snap, its exuberant air of slight excess." But as a critic he's an admirably close, inquisitive reader, and of course he's still John fucking Updike to all of us, so having him in town is a delight. In theory he'll be talking to the Seattle Arts & Lectures audience about small towns and the middle class.

To mark the centennial of Theodore Roethke’s birth, poets Linda Bierds, Andrew Feld, Richard Kenney, Colleen McElroy, Heather McHugh, and Pimone Triplett are gathering to read and talk about Roethke, who inspires that kind of devotion, whether you knew him personally or not. The Washington Center for the Book, Poetry Society of America, and University of Washington Creative Writing Program are throwing the party at the Seattle Public Library, in the Microsoft Auditorium. It's this Wednesday, from 7 to 8:30 p.m., and it's free.

For a MacArthur-proclaimed genius, Linda Bierds is fairly low profile. She lives on Bainbridge Island, teaches in the English department at the University of Washington, and has had tons of poems published in mainstream literary magazines such as The Atlantic and The New Yorker, the holy grail of "someone who's not an MFA student has read my poetry" achievement. Tomorrow night she's at the UW Bookstore (7:00 p.m., free), reading from her new book, Flight.

Adrian Tomine started making comics in his teens when he created Optic Nerve. In it, he tells stories about people who tend to be searching for answers to questions they seem to think everyone else already knows. After a few years putting out Optic Nerve on his own, it was picked up by publisher Drawn and Quarterly.

Web site just to see if any disaster had befallen us overnight that may take precedence over our literary venture. What we saw, buried toward the end of the day's headlines, was this:

. The novels explore the interaction between the Christian West and Muslim East and the struggle between Modernity and fundamentalism, and as such, Pamuk was seen as the anti-Samuel Huntington. That explanation has never been entirely satisfying, but for the uninitiated not yet familiar with the work of this prodigiously gifted writer, this can serve as a brief introduction to the ideas that will be flying at Benaroya tonight, when Pamuk makes a much anticipated appearance as part of the Seattle Arts & Lectures series.

The trio of authors Akashic's showcasing includes the novelists Felicia Luna Lemus and Joe Meno, neither of whom we've read and therefore can't comment on. But trust us--it's worth going for Chris Abani alone. An exiled Nigerian playwright and novelist, Abani was such a thorn in the military regime's side that they even tried to assassinate him in London (prompting his move to the US, where he currently teaches at UCLA).

Last night Seattlest went to Town Hall to hear Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini read from his new novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns. Hosseini's first novel, The Kite Runner was in many ways a phenomenal achievement and by all accounts, the new book has surpassed even the most hopeful of expectations.

This month we subject Pauls Toutonghi’s young adult novel Red Weather to the awesome critical power that is Seattlest. The book has nothing to do with Seattle, but Toutonghi allegedly spent some formative years here and he’s old friends with our most frequent contributor, so what the hell? We’re trying out a new “point/counterpoint” format, with contributors Matt Silvie and James Callan facing off.

One of the great things about the German Expressionist era is that the films are so much fun to watch -- they're some of the hardest working visuals in show business. But at the Paramount, you also get Dennis James on the Mighty (Liberace-Lookin') Wurlitzer, and for the first time at the Paramount, we enjoyed the sound up in the balcony. Whoever placed the organ's pipes knew what they were doing -- we felt like we had our "stereophonic" headphones on. And who knew a pipe organ could create such a snappy snare drum roll?

Ever desired to follow in the footsteps of Henry Miller, Anne Rice, or Anonymous? The Richard Hugo House is giving you your chance:

Richard Hugo House invites writers age 18 and older to submit manuscripts of fewer than 5,000 words to its erotica writing competition. The theme is "One Foot on the Floor" and the deadline is February 1. The winner will receive a $250 prize, a $50 gift certificate from Babeland and the chance to read on the Hugo House cabaret stage with an established writer on February 13, 2007.

Continue reading "Talk Dirty(ish) to Richard Hugo"

In this week's Stranger, Franklin grad Brendan Kiley remembers getting hit on by Allen Ginsberg at a 1994 reading.

Seattlest has come to borrow from you again.

To have been at McCaw Hall Friday night, is to have been truly blessed. It was a night filled with smiles, laughter and bottomless admiration – not only for the performers, but also for the people behind the scenes for whom this night was meant to benefit. It was a night which, at one point, brought a couple tears to our eyes. But we’re sensitive like that.

Those design-obsessed types over at Coudal Partners have just recently posted Field Tested Books, an online compendium of book reviews by lots of bookish (and blogish) people. Not just your ordinary reviews, these focus on books read in specific places and the impact the locale had on the reader's experience (hence, Coudal likes to refer to them as "experience reviews" instead).

Seattlest used to subscribe to The New Yorker. Actually, Seattlest still does subscribe to The New Yorker, but since late September we've barely managed to keep up with the cartoons each week, let alone more substantial content.

Octavia Butler died at the age of 58 yesterday after a fall near her home in Lake Forest Park. She was the only science fiction writer ever to recieve a MacArthur Foundation genius award.

That guy that's usually tapping at his laptop and gazing off into the middle distance at the cafe has suddenly disappeared. He's at home furiously typing his tell-all memoir: "The world knew me as a female refugee from the Phillipines who escaped a life of political oppression, violence, prostitution and drugs but now I must reveal myself as a midwestern white boy who lied about it all to sell a few books. The ironic thing is, none of the fake pain I was writing about can compare to the actual devastation of living with this lie for the past ten years."

Face it, you're getting old. Despite your best efforts, Father Time and Mother Nature are doing a number on your body, mind, and soul. You wake up to achey joints, you're worried about your 401k, and you spend your days working for "The Man" instead of following your dreams. So you go to the gym (or at least say you will) realizing it's a losing battle, read books to stay sharp, and try to not admit that you really don't get "that noise that the kids are into these days." Where did it all go wrong?

What with all the tear gas, video crews, and Subcomandante Marcos imitators in Seattle in 1999 for the WTO protests, Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper’s resignation seemed a bit anticlimactic. It was ironic (but not deliciously) that “Chief Moonbeam” oversaw SPD’s flirtation with jackbooted riot-gear finery. Previously, the San Diego transplant had been criticized by–-what’s the word? Neofascists?--for speaking out of school about police brutality and for his cultural inclusiveness.

What is the newcomer visitor's impression of our fair city? To get an idealistic, naive, oddly balanced, yet sentimentally contemplative exposition on what and how Seattle impresses the self aware and unrushed foreign visitor, you've got to read the opening section of this piece** in the Atlantic Monthly (June 2005).

Literature is rife with portrayals of descents into madness. It's rarer in sports, but the Sacramento Kings' performance in their first-round playoff series with the Sonics is an exception.

Who doesn’t love pornography? Ok, how about the pornography business? You probably don't know that much about it, but Legs McNeil does. Legs McNeil, former editor of Spin magazine and former editor-in-chief of Nerve, gets down and dirty with his newest book The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of The Porn Film Industry. In the past, his focus has primarily been on music, including Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, a book often considered to be the definitive chronicle of the genre.

Seattle Spit is hosted at Seattle's one (1!) lesbian bar and it's billed as a "queer/trans" reading, but don't go see it because of that. Go see it because the people scheduled to read this month are amazing.